After 3﻿1/2 days of deliberations, the jury reached a verdict late Wednesday in the civil trial of two former De Anza College baseball players accused by a young woman of gang rape.

The forewoman, a Cisco (CSCO) programs manager, will announce the verdict Thursday morning.

The jury of six men and six women had to decide whether former players Kenneth Chadwick and Christopher Knopf are liable for the alleged sexual assault at a house party four years ago when the young woman was 17 years old.

Her lawyers argued that the jury should find Chadwick liable and order him to pay $2.5 million in damages for a single cause of action — negligence. They allege he failed to rescue the teen from a tiny room where eight men allegedly masturbated or had sex with her on March 3, 2007, at a raucous San Jose house party.

Led by attorney Barbara Spector, the young woman’s legal team claims she was too intoxicated to consent and had to be rescued by three female De Anza soccer players, who helped her off a stained mattress where she allegedly lay in a pool of vomit, and drove her to the hospital.

The men contend that they are being unfairly blamed by a troubled young woman who wasn’t that drunk and explicitly invited them to have sex with her.

The young woman is seeking $5 million from Knopf for 10 causes of action: negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, rape of an unconscious woman, rape of an intoxicated woman, false imprisonment, battery, sexual battery, invasion of privacy, unlawful intercourse and conspiracy. If the jury found that Knopf entered into even an unspoken conspiracy with the other men in the room, he would automatically be liable for everything that happened to the teen in that room before, during and after he was there.

In civil litigation, the plaintiff wins if nine of the 12 jurors agree that the “preponderance of evidence” favors her on each cause of action. That is a lower standard of proof than in criminal trials, where jurors must unanimously agree that the defendant is guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The jury in a civil trial can assign the young woman a percentage of blame for negligence for contributing to her own plight, an option that angers some women’s advocates. The defense noted she brought alcohol to the party and performed a public lap dance, and the men claim she asked for anal sex. Any percentage assigned to her would reduce the damages the men have to pay.

The jurors range in age from 25 to 72, and include a schoolteacher, software engineer and an unemployed worker.

Nine men were originally on trial, but six were dropped shortly after testimony began and the defense turned up recent Facebook pictures of the young woman partying in scanty clothing. Two of the men are completely off the hook, and the others either settled for relatively small sums compared with the millions the plaintiff sought, or gave the woman’s lawyers the right to try to collect damages from their insurance companies. Another man, the only person who wasn’t on the baseball team, never showed up for trial and is facing a default judgment.

But the jury also can assign them a percentage of blame for negligence, though they will not have to contribute to any damages.

Earlier this week, in a written question submitted to Judge Aaron Persky, jurors asked whether they could skip deciding whether a defendant was liable for a cause of action, apparently because they couldn’t muster the nine votes necessary to make the call. The judge gave them permission to do so. It was unclear late Wednesday whether they hung on that cause of action, or came back to it and decided.

A special verdict form asked the jury to decide up to 43 questions, some of which the panel had to answer only if it found a defendant liable for a cause of action.

Tracey Kaplan is a reporter for the Bay Area News Group based at The Mercury News. She covers courts and has been in love with reporting for the past 30 years, including eight at the Los Angeles Times where she was part of a group that won a breaking news Pulitzer for coverage of the 1994 Northridge quake. Recently, she and two fellow reporters won first place for enterprise reporting from the California Newspaper Publishers Association. Talking to people -- including activists, public defenders, prosecutors, academics and inmates -- about the strengths and troubling weaknesses of the criminal justice system fascinates her, as does swimming laps as often as she can.